Pursuant to prior discussions about the need for a research
policy on Wikipedia, WikiProject Research is drafting a
policy regarding the recruitment of Wikipedia users to
participate in studies.
At this time, we have a proposed policy, and an accompanying
group that would facilitate recruitment of subjects in much
the same way that the Bot Approvals Group approves bots.
The policy proposal can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research
The Subject Recruitment Approvals Group mentioned in the proposal
is being described at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group
Before we move forward with seeking approval from the Wikipedia
community, we would like additional input about the proposal,
and would welcome additional help improving it.
Also, please consider participating in WikiProject Research at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Research
--
Bryan Song
GroupLens Research
University of Minnesota
Hi!
I am doing a PhD on online civic participation project
(e-participation). Within my research, I have carried out a user
survey, where I asked how many people ever edited/created a page on a
Wiki. Now I would like to compare the results with the overall rate of
wiki editing/creation on country level.
I've found some country-level statistics on Wikipedia Statistics (e.g.
3,000 editors of Wikipedia articles in Italy) but data for UK and
France are not available since Wikipedia provides statistics by
languages, not by countries. I'm thus looking for statistics on UK and
France (but am also interested in alternative ways of measuring wiki
editing/creation in Sweden and Italy).
I would be grateful for any tips!
Sunny regards, Alina
--
Alina ÖSTLING
PhD Candidate
European University Institute
www.eui.eu
Hi all;
I'm starting a new project, a wiki search engine. It uses MediaWiki,
Semantic MediaWiki and other minor extensions, and some tricky templates
and bots.
I remember Wikia Search and how it failed. It had the mini-article thingy
for the introduction, and then a lot of links compiled by a crawler. Also
something similar to a social network.
My project idea (which still needs a cool name) is different. Althought it
uses an introduction and images copied from Wikipedia, and some links from
the "External links" sections, it is only a start. The purpose is that
community adds, removes and orders the results for each term, and creates
redirects for similar terms to avoid duplicates.
Why this? I think that Google PageRank isn't enough. It is frequently
abused by farmlinks, SEOs and other people trying to put their websites
above.
Search "Shakira" in Google for example. You see 1) Official site, 2)
Wikipedia 3) Twitter 4) Facebook, then some videos, some news, some images,
Myspace. It wastes 3 or more results in obvious nice sites (WP, TW, FB).
The wiki search engine puts these sites in the top, and an introduction and
related terms, leaving all the space below to not so obvious but
interesting websites. Also, if you search for "semantic queries" like
"right-wing newspapers" in Google, you won't find real newspapers but
"people and sites discussing about ring-wing newspapers". Or latex and
LaTeX being shown in the same results pages. These issues can be resolved
with disambiguation result pages.
How we choose which results are above or below? The rules are not fully
designed yet, but we can put official sites in the first place, then .gov
or .edu domains which are important ones, and later unofficial websites,
blogs, giving priority to local language, etc. And reaching consensus.
We can control aggresive spam with spam blacklists, semi-protect or protect
highly visible pages, and use bots or tools to check changes.
It obviously has a CC BY-SA license and results can be exported. I think
that this approach is the opposite to Google today.
For weird queries like "Albert Einstein birthplace" we can redirect to the
most obvious results page (in this case Albert Einstein) using a hand-made
redirect or by software (some little change in MediaWiki).
You can check a pretty alpha version here http://www.todogratix.es (only
Spanish by now sorry) which I'm feeding with some bots.
I think that it is an interesting experiment. I'm open to your questions
and feedback.
Regards,
emijrp
--
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT <http://code.google.com/p/avbot/> |
StatMediaWiki<http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es>
| WikiEvidens <http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/> |
WikiPapers<http://wikipapers.referata.com>
| WikiTeam <http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/>
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
Mark Graham and I are co-chairs of the Wikipedia Track at next year's WikiSym conference (now with added OpenSym!) and we're preparing the call for papers to go out Friday week. There has been such great discussion on this list in the past about what is currently missing from Wikipedia research that I thought I'd send our draft to you in case there are items that you think we might add? Our current suggestions below:
• What do particular articles or groups or articles tell us about the norms, governance and architecture of Wikipedia and its impact on media, politics and the social sphere? How is information on Wikipedia being shaped by the materiality of Wikipedia infrastructure?
• What is the impact of all/some of Wikipedia’s 211 language editions having on achieving the project’s goal to represent the “sum of all human knowledge”? Do smaller language editions follow the same development path as larger language editions? Can different representations in different languages tell us anything about cultural, national or regional differences?
• What are the methodological challenges to studying Wikipedia? How are researchers engaging with innovative methodologies to solve some of these problems? How are other researchers using traditional or well-established methods to study Wikipedia?
• How are wiki projects other than Wikipedia evolving? What are the benefits to studying other wiki projects and can comparisons and generalisations be made from our observations of these systems?
• How does information contained in Wikipedia shape our understanding of broader social, economic, and political practices and processes? What theoretical frameworks in social, economic, legal and other relevant theoretical traditions can be applied to enrich the academic discourse on Wikipedia?
Also really looking forward to some great papers next year. We think that it's a really good thing that Wikipedia research has a separate track next year and we're hoping that it's going to really strengthen the quality of research. Looking forward to any suggestions you might have.
Best,
Heather.
Heather Ford
Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Programme
www.ethnographymatters.net
@hfordsa on Twitter
http://hblog.org
There are a number of interesting topics in this month's Recent Research report. The detailed list of contents for the Research Report may intrigue some readers of Wikimedia-l and Research-l. The report is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-11-26/Recen…. More information about the report is available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter.
Personally, I was most appreciative of the information under "Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation". Quoting from the report: "Based on an analysis of a sample of 1390 editors with known political affiliation – either US Democrat or Republican – (the authors) conclude that although the social identity of editors is strongly reflected in their editorial interests – that is, the topics on which they are more active – but that being "Wikipedian" dominates the political affiliation when it comes to user pages. In contrast with other social media e.g., blogosphere, where cross-party interactions are very much underrepresented, it appears that Wikipedian dialogues between editors from opposing parties are relatively profound and notable. On the day before the US presidential election, the paper's results were highlighted on the Wikimedia blog under the headline "In divisive times, Wikipedia brings political opponents together".
Recent Research report topics for November 2012:
"Early prediction of movie box-office revenues with Wikipedia data"
"Readability of the English Wikipedia, Simple Wikipedia, and Britannica compared"
"Wikipedia favors established views and scientifically backed knowledge"
"Trust, authority and credentials on Wikipedia: The case of the Essjay controversy"
"Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation"
"Eye-tracking study: Readers look at TOC first, then infobox"
"Edit categories in featured and non-featured articles"
"How the TV schedule influences Wikipedia pageviews"
"A truthfulness verification system based on Wikipedia"
"Characterizing Wikipedia traffic"
"One-year article ratings dump released"
"Measuring countries' visibility on Wikipedia"
"Ratio of African Wikipedia readers rising, but still low"
--Pine
Maybe of interest... -Jodi
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jutta Haider <jutta.haider(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 7:19 PM
Subject: [Air-L] CFP Theme section: Changing orders of knowledge?
Encyclopaedias in transition
To: Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org
CALL FOR PAPERS
Theme section: Changing orders of knowledge? Encyclopaedias in transition
To appear in the peer-reviewed journal Culture Unbound: Journal of Current
Cultural Research
Guest editors: Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin, Department of Arts and Cultural
Sciences, Lund University, Sweden
We are witnessing a transition period for encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic
knowledge. Since the 1990s alone encyclopaedias have gone through several
remediations: from printed volumes to CD-ROM, from CD-ROM to on-line
editions on the web and most recently as smartphone applications. Nowadays
encyclopaedic knowledge is produced, distributed and used largely within
digital networks. Mobile devices make it always available, everywhere.
While understandably a lot has been said about Wikipedia and from almost
every angle, other contemporary encyclopaedias have not received that much
attention in research. Yet they are two sides of the same coin. This theme
section wants to contribute to changing the balance somewhat.
The modern encyclopaedia, with its roots in the enlightenment, has come to
symbolise learning and education. In the West it has since long been a
yardstick for what is accepted as public knowledge in a given time and
culture. It stands for trustworthiness and stability, at the same time as
it has always changed hand in hand with cultural and technical
developments. Most recently their production, consumption, use,
distribution and significance, all are undergoing profound changes. At the
same time as these changes contribute to re-structuring what encyclopaedias
and encyclopaedic knowledge are, this type of knowledge is more easily
accessible, more in demand and more often referred to than ever before.
For this theme section we invite authors to reflect upon the encounter,
productive or otherwise, between encyclopaedic knowledge formed by a
plethora of traditions and the constantly changing material conditions for
production, communication, use and circulation of knowledge. In particular
so-called traditional encyclopaedias in their contemporary digital
manifestations are in focus. While emphasis on relevant sociotechnical and
cultural aspects of the present is encouraged, there will be some room for
historical studies that focus on encyclopaedias in transition and for
studies on Wikipedia (and other new forms from social and cultural
perspectives of encyclopaedias and related phenomena)
Topics of interest might be, but are not limited to:
• Everyday meaning of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic knowledge.
• Encyclopaedias in the classroom and other educational uses.
• Economic aspects and the role of changed business-models.
• Critical studies of encyclopaedic knowledge.
• Globalisation of knowledge and the role of encyclopaedias.
• Production of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic knowledge.
• Encyclopaedias as a yardstick for public knowledge.
• Communication of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic knowledge.
• The situatedeness of encyclopaedias in the networked society.
We are also looking for relevant book reviews for this issue!
Please indicate your interest in contributing by submitting a title and
short abstract (approximately 500 words) before 1st April 2013. The
deadline for full papers is 1st of October 2013 and publication is planned
for the spring of 2014. The articles should between 4,000 and 10,000 words
long. Please send enquires, abstracts and finished papers to
jutta.haider(a)kultur.lu.se or olof.sundin(a)kultur.lu.se
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research is an academic
journal for border-crossing cultural research, including cultural studies
as well as other interdisciplinary and transnational currents. It serves as
a forum with a wider scope than existing journals for cultural studies or
other, more specific, subfields of cultural research and it is globally
open to articles from all areas in this large field.
http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/index.html
For a guide for authors please refer to:
http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/instructions-for-authors.html.
_______________________________________________
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because it was the topic of heated discussions earlier this year, including
quite a few comments about the integrity, openness, and
profit/not-for-profit status of JSTOR, I am pleased to note that--as both
Richard Jensen and I suggested would be quite possible if a straightforward
and thoughtful request were put to them directly--JSTOR has now created a
pilot program to provide access to the most active Wikipedia editors to
what appears to be the entirety of the JSTOR database. This looks to be the
result of laudable efforts by some members of the Wikimedia Foundation and
of JSTOR (in particular, Steven Walling of Wikimedia and Kristen Garlock of
JSTOR), all of whom deserve major credit for this welcome development.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/19/jstor-provides-free-access-to-wikipedi…
I also note that this is part of a general outreach effort on part of JSTOR
to provide access to unaffiliated individuals who need or even want it:
Wikipedia contributors beyond the pilot group can also take advantage of
> growing access, as can readers. JSTOR provides free access to Early Journal
> Content and recently introduced Register & Read, an experimental program to
> offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who
> register for a MyJSTOR account. More information may be found at
> about.jstor.org/individuals.
>
I have long felt JSTOR in particular was being unreasonably tarnished in
many online communities, including to some extent this one, and I would
suggest that this very welcome development reveals that JSTOR is quite
willing to work with many different kinds of groups who for various reasons
can't afford access to the archive.
I think this also shows that a balanced approach to the open access issue
can potentially be successful, without prohibiting nonprofits like JSTOR
from charging a reasonable fee for its significant services to institutions
that have long been accustomed to paying for scholarly work product of many
kinds. I very much hope this effort is successful for all the parties
concerned.
David
--
David Golumbia
dgolumbia(a)gmail.com